As personal computers and server systems decline in price, more and more businesses and individuals are taking advantage of the content storage features of those machines to enhance daily activities. As storage media with larger and larger capacities becomes available, the amount of content that users are able to store continues to grow. Businesses are increasingly able to record and store critical performance measures, such as inventory levels for individual products, contents of a particular customer's purchase order, sales trends for items over a particular season or other calendar period, experimental result sets, logistics pathways, or delivery and maintenance schedules. Consumers are able to build repositories of digital content, including all forms of media and personal documents, as well as create catalogs for physical items, such as books in a library.
Many times, while the storage facilities are generally provided, including physical data capacity and software that interfaces with an operating system to maintain the digital representation of content, suitable application software is not provided for allowing users to effectively manage their content. A business may have many large quantities of information in a data warehouse, filled with data from several operational systems, but no convenient interface for viewing, editing, adding to, or deleting any of that information. Individuals may similarly have large amounts of content that cannot be accessed in any meaningful way.
Often the only solution is to employ one or more persons possessing advanced software development skills that can create a content management system for use in viewing or maintaining content. For individuals, this solution may be far too expensive. For small businesses, which may not be able to justify having a fulltime IT staff, this solution is equally prohibitive. Contract or short-term help, such as consultants, may be utilized to build an appropriate content management system, but long-term supportability may represent hidden costs, especially in situations where the created system is damaged or destroyed, for example, through hardware failure or viral infection. Some companies provide a solution, though hosting a content management system that is accessible using an Internet connection. However, with those solutions, users may not be permitted to customize or modify their content management system, because they are not given sufficient access to the code project for making such changes. Additionally, hosted solutions provide their content management systems as a service, which must be paid for on a periodic basis (e.g., monthly) otherwise they shut down, leaving a user without anything at all to work with.
What is needed is a computer program product that is capable of collecting a few simple options for a user which can then build a content management system that can be used to view, modify, add to, and delete a given content repository.